Though he seems more affable grandfather than Dirty Harry these days, Eastwood shows no signs of softening. Or, at age 76 after decades in the movie business on both sides of the camera, of slowing down. Flags of Our Fathers is about the iconic Second World War Battle of Iwo Jima.
It's a massive project. At US$90 million, it's by far his largest budget. The epic film incorporates massive beachfront invasion scenes, features about 100 speaking parts and spans three periods in time.
The story behind Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's Feb. 23, 1945, picture of five Marines and one Navy corpsman raising the flag on the island's Mount Suribachi is not a simple one to tell. "I think as I've matured -- if that's a way of saying aging -- I've reached out to different sides of stories that were appealing to me," Eastwood said.
"As I got to this stage of life, where I am now, where I'm retreating to the backside of the camera, I just felt it was time to address a lot of things that were closer to me than a lot of the fantasy characters I might have been involved with." People back home wanted an uncomplicated, uplifting story to go with it. But the photo showed the second flag-raising that day (an American military higher-up requested it as a memento).
Though perceived as a symbol of victory, it was snapped days into what turned out to be a bloody, month-long battle in which Japan lost almost all its 22,000 soldiers and nearly 7,000 Americans died. Within days, half the men in the photo had been killed. The American government wasted no time shipping the trio of survivors -- Navy corpsman John (Doc) Bradley and Marines Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon -- back home to capitalize on the popular picture and drum up cash as part of the famous Seventh War Bond Tour.
Still youngsters, the three became instant celebrities just a short time after watching their comrades die on the battlefield. All struggled with their war experiences, their notoriety --feeling they didn't deserve it -- a government willing to exploit them and the adjustment to life after it all abruptly ended mere months later. "It wasn't really a war story.
I wasn't setting out to do a war movie -- I've been involved with a few as an actor," said Eastwood. "But I liked this. It was just a study of these people.
" Still, Eastwood has not flinched from creating shocking, grisly combat scenes. Because of the content, there are those who have tried to draw parallels between this film and the current war in Iraq. Eastwood wouldn't wade far into that debate other than to call war in general a "futile exercise.
" "The country seemed much more, I'm sure it wasn't, but in hindsight, much more unified," he said. "The war we're in today is, excluding the Iraq war on the front lines, ideology, religion, there's a lot of factors coming into it, that may make the next war even more difficult. "(The Second World War) was much more cut and dried.
" Son of the highly decorated Navy corpsman in the photo, Bradley grew up in a house where the subject of Iwo Jima was mostly off limits. It was only after his father died, after interviewing men who fought on Iwo Jima, Bradley learned how those in the photo had been tormented by the experience and put the pieces together in the book. "I've always been curious about families who find out things about their relatives much after the fact," Eastwood said.
"In the era we live in now, everybody's being considered a hero," Eastwood said. "In that era, in the '40s, heroes were people of extraordinary feat." In the leadup to Flags, Eastwood started thinking about the Japanese soldiers and sent for the book Letters From Iwo Jima, made up of missives home from Japanese Lieut.
Tadamichi Kuribayashi. He then persuaded the studios to let him make a second movie, in Japanese, from the Japanese perspective.
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